From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  But now there were only two places she could go next time the sand washed out: against a great, jagged mountain of bleached driftwood on the upper point of the island, or, if she wheeled the other way, into the churning chute of the Devil’s Raceground itself, which now was full of speeding, bobbing trees and root boles from the collapsed riverbank. William was on deck now, glancing around for a recourse. This precious boat had been at the mercy of the Missouri River long enough; the river was going to destroy her. It was time to get her back.

  Plunging into the cabin and snatching up a coil of rope, he scrambled back topside and made one end fast to a cleat. “I need strong swimmers!” he yelled.

  Among the three or four who clambered toward him were Captain Lewis, Collins, and York, their chests heaving. William grinned at Lewis and shook his head. He passed the free end of the rope to York and Collins and pointed across the chute. On the far shore were the men of the towing crew, who had been running down through the brush opposite the drifting ship. “Can ye take this to them?” William demanded. York and Collins looked at each other, grinned, and nodded. “Go, then, and keep it out o’ the trees if ye can!”

  Holding the new rope, Collins and York leaped off. They were up to their thighs on sandbar for a moment, then their footing was swept from under them and they disappeared under the water. In a moment York’s kinky poll appeared; his scarlet headkerchief had come off and it went away down the brown water. Then Collins’s head emerged, and they struck out for the far shore, strong arms slashing into the water, being borne downstream much faster than they could go across. Somewhere below, Scannon’s deep bark resounded. “Look,” William yelled. The dog was on the island, running back and forth excitedly, stopping now and then to shake out his wet coat, his black ears and pink tongue flapping. He was having a marvelous time. Captain Lewis sighed with relief, then turned to watch York and Collins anxiously.

  Huge trees kept bearing down on them, but they kept out of the way. Finally, by the time they reached the other bank and were hauled ashore by their waiting compatriots, most of the debris had already gone down. Now the new rope was carried up the shore and tied to the broken end of the old one, and the towing crew, reinforced by York and Collins, set off up the riverbank once more. The last sandbar dissolved under the hull, and the Discovery nosed upstream once again, eight men now on her four unbroken oars, and bit by bit she was rowed and towed up into the open water.

  A camp was made in a bright green wood near the Rivière La Charrette, where an extra ration of whiskey was doled out to the chilled, trembling, exhausted, laughing soldiers, and then cooking fires were built. Scannon had been picked up off the island by one of the pirogues and reunited with his happy master.

  While pork and pone were being cooked, the hunters George Drouillard and Private Alexander Willard emerged from the woods with four horses they had been bringing up from St. Charles.

  “God Almighty!” yelped young George Shannon, pointing at the tow-rope burns on his broad shoulders. “Why didn’t ye bring us them damn nags two hours ago when we needed ’em?”

  THE CARPENTERS CUT WOOD AND MADE NEW OARS THAT evening. William stood for a while watching John Shields work the new white wood with a drawknife. The work was mesmerizing. Pulled so surely and effortlessly by Shields’s powerful hands, the razor-sharp two-handled knife whisked off long, perfect, curling shavings as if the tough, green ash wood were soft as soap. In ten minutes Shields could produce one perfect oar and a pile of fragrant shavings a foot deep. Shields drawled, still pulling the knife tirelessly, “Sir, that man York o’ yours, he surely amazed me what ’e done today. I never knowed a nigger to voluntair for nothin’ afore. ’Specially anything hard or dangerous.”

  That had amazed William, too, even more than Collins’s performance had. York had always liked to brag big and bold, but this was the first time he had ever really put himself on the line, and William had been wondering whether York finally might be, after all these years, undergoing an improvement of character. He looked over toward the mess fires, where York was supposed to be fixing supper. His cookfire was untended and smoky, and he had not even started to fix the food, because he was too busy telling everyone about his heroic swim.

  Nay, William thought. ’Twas but a fluke. He’s the same as ever.

  SHOUTS AT DAYBREAK HERALDED THE APPROACH OF A LONG, overloaded dugout with a small crew of Frenchmen. It proved to be Regis Loisel, a fur trader who had wintered 400 leagues up the river, in Sioux Indian country. Lewis had heard of him in St. Louis, and now invited him aboard the Discovery to drink coffee and tell all he knew about that long stretch of river.

  Loisel, sturdy, smelly, thickly bewhiskered, was mainly in a mood to curse the Sioux. Numerous, well-armed, and arrogant, and partial to the British traders of the North West Company, they often turned back other traders who came up, Loisel said; they had bullied him and forced him to sell his goods at such low prices that he would have no profit this year. The Sioux had come to conceive of all white men as cowards and weaklings, Loisel said. He warned Lewis to be wary especially of a snake of a chieftain called Partizan. Lewis thanked him for the advice, but said:

  “I don’t expect we’ll let ourselves be scared back by a snake called Partizan. My own Cap’n Clark here, as you can see, is a copperhead.”

  William smiled politely. Lewis’s jokes, he had noticed, were a bit like Brother Jonathan’s.

  But he had a conviction that the Sioux were not going to be a joking matter, when the Corps of Discovery reached them.

  Twelve hundred miles to their country, he thought, looking out at the Missouri, which now in this morning light looked like boiling mercury. By the time we reach them we might be worn down to our hands and knees by that bedamned river.

  FALLS OF THE OHIO

  June 15, 1804

  GEORGE AND FANNY KNEW BETTER THAN TO EXPECT ANY more letters from William for a long time, but whenever the post rider came up the hill, they thought of him. He had written last letters to them just before setting out up the Missouri last month, and they had no reason to expect any more word from him for a year at least.

  Now they sat opening a bundle of mail on the porch as the post rider went away down the hill toward Clarksville, and quickly ascertained that there was nothing from William.

  George would always divide his letters, putting those from friends and relatives in one stack and those concerning business or civil matters in another.

  Fanny’s were all personal. She was looking for one in particular. And here it was: Young Judge Fitzhugh’s flamboyant script. It would be the same thing he wrote her every time: a plea for her to move back across the river to Louisville so they could see each other every day. She was weakening on that point, and she knew that one of these days she would likely be having to tell George. She dreaded that; she dreaded the thought of leaving him here alone. And so she kept hoping that his mail would contain some happy news, some great turn of fortune in his favor, so that he would be cheerful about other things and not so likely to plunge into a drinking spell when she left. She felt guilty about the mere thought of leaving his roof. But after all, she was being courted by a truly charming and worthy man, and she was not getting any younger. And her sons, though they doted on their Uncle George and probably learned more from him than they would in any school, really should not grow up little recluses here on this wild and lonely Point o’ Rock. So now she opened Dennis Fitzhugh’s letter, smoothing back a wayward lock of hair at the edge of her dustbonnet, as if Dennis could look up from the page of his letter and see her. George saw the tenderness melting her face, and so he delved into his own letters.

  A shiver ran through his cheeks. There was one from Breckenridge, in the Senate. The sight of it made his hand tremble. He decided he would read it last, knowing that its contents, whether good or ill, would so outweigh the others as to distract his attention from them altogether. Besides, he wanted to have just that exact degree of a rum buzz in his head when he opened that
one, and he had not yet had even a sip today. So, while Fanny read her love letter, George unstoppered the little jug beside his chair as unobtrusively as possible, and trickled a dram into a glass, and sipped this while opening the personal mail. These were the usual things. Inquiries as to his health. Invitations to the birthday parties of nieces and nephews and the sons and daughters of old comrades. A note from Diana Gwathmey, his favorite niece, that she would like to come up to Point o’ Rock for a few days’ visit. Requests to borrow books from his library. A request for advice on personal conduct from Lucy’s son George Croghan, now thirteen. Some questions from Brother Edmund, now a Louisville Trustee, concerning the town’s earliest surveys. A letter from some stranger asking whether George thought the recent murder and scalping of Jim Harrod might somehow be connected to the mysterious councils being held everywhere by the young Shawnee war chief Tecumseh. A letter of good wishes from old Francois Vigo, dictated by him and signed with his X. George read all these and let the rum diffuse throughout his body.

  Eh, well, he thought. Now for John Breckenridge and news on my land petition. He poured two fingers of rum into his glass, paused, saw that Fanny was not looking, poured two more, gulped half of it, then broke the letter’s seal, ready now for anything, though his heart was pumping mightily.

  It was a short and apologetic note from the Senator, enclosing a report from the Committee on Public Lands. George read, his mouth gradually dropping open, a great heat slowly building in his breast.

  He could hardly believe the course of reasoning that the Committee had followed to decide on his petition: They had twisted the language of his request around so as to imply that he had asked for the original Piankeshaw grant itself. Then they had gone on to rule that that piece of land was not available to give, since it had already been divided up among the veterans of the Illinois Regiment.

  George threw the whole contents of his glass down his throat and banged a fist on his chair arm. “I didn’t ask ye for that land, God damn it!” he shouted at the report in his hand. “I made it plain I was asking for a like piece!”

  Fanny had started up from her love letter and when she saw George scowling red-faced over his letter, the rum glass shaking in his hand, she thought:

  Oh, no. Someone’s dashed him again, and bad this time.

  The report concluded:

  The Committee therefore, on this ground alone, independent of any arguments drawn from the policy of practise of the federal government, have no hesitation in giving it as their opinion that the prayer of the petitioner ought not be granted.

  He rose from his chair, flung the report to the porch floor, and stamped on it. “By th’ Eternal! Can’t senators even read?”

  “George, what is it?” Fanny asked.

  He didn’t answer. He sloshed another long ration of rum into his glass, and then as quickly down his throat. He paced back and forth the length of the porch, teeth bared, eyes blazing, spitting on the report or spurning it under heel each time he passed it. Finally he flung the empty glass down at it; the fragments shot out into the sunlight. “George!” she cried. Cupid’s face appeared at the doorway and then vanished.

  George stood scowling down at the soiled report now, chest heaving. He picked up the jug from the bench and took a long pull direct from it. “O’ course they can read,” he snarled. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “They pretended to misread it, for an excuse to say no. Deliberate God-damn pettifoggery’s all it is!”

  “The Indian’s grant?” Fanny queried.

  “Aye. Congress didn’t like my bedtime story.”

  “George, oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Maybe it’s because o’ the Genet thing, he thought. That had long been in the back of his mind. Some people back East chose to consider him a traitor, though he had never, in writing, actually quite got around to expatriating himself.

  “Well, by damn, that’s the last time Congress will ever hear from me! Those ingrates shall never have the satisfaction o’ turning me down ever again! If they gave me something now, I’d pound it up their nostrils! I’ve lived broke a quarter century on account o’ what I gave this country. I reckon I can keep on living broke. What’s it matter? I’m richer than any scoundrel in Congress anyhow, for I’ve got my honor in me!”

  And with that, he sank into his chair, tilted up the jug again, guzzled, then began bellowing the old marching song, the one his boys had sung on the way to Vincennes, while Fanny shrank in her chair, blinking, her love letter clenched in her hand. He sang gruffly, grimacing, waving the jug:

  “When I first came to th’ town

  They brought me bot-tles plen-ty.

  But now they have changed their tune,

  And bring me bot-tles emp-ty!

  O diddle lully day!

  O de liddle li-o-day…”

  Well, this is no time to leave him, Fanny thought, and she joined in her small voice:

  “… O diddle lully day,

  De liddle li-o-dum day!”

  33

  ABOVE THE MOUTH OF THE KANSAS RIVER

  June 29, 1804

  WILLIAM TRIED TO CONCENTRATE ON HIS JOURNAL. BUT IT was hard to write when a whipping was on his mind.

  There was always so damned much writing to be done!

  William sat at his field desk under an awning with his leather-bound journal open in front of him and wrote laboriously, trying to bring it up to date. It seemed that every spare minute had to be devoted to writing, and there were few spare minutes. Sometimes days would pass before any opportunity presented itself for journal-keeping, and then there would be such a backlog of notes, so much to record, because every day in this new country brought to their eyes new kinds of plants and animals Jefferson wanted to know of. And there were descriptions of the land, the weather, the minerals, the Indians; the health of the party: the ax wounds, the snakebits, the boils, the dysentery, and the treatments thereof; reports on food: the successes of the hunting parties, the amount of flour and meal and salt pork consumed, the new kinds of edible vegetation found along the way. William found himself writing and thinking constantly about food. Food was a preoccupation for a party of forty-five men engaged in endless labor of the heaviest kind and having to live primarily off the land. It was hard to believe how much meat the men required; William had been calculating, and it seemed to average eight to ten pounds of fresh meat a day for each man. Fortunately, game animals were various and abundant, and so tame and inquisitive sometimes as to make killing them seem more like murder than hunting. But the party’s appetite was not surprising, considering their exertions. They were up every morning at dawn light, out on the water doing battle with the swift current and obstacles of this demon of a river. In suffocating heat, they rowed, poled, towed, and pushed the fleet upstream. Several times in their six weeks of travel thus far, the boats had been nearly swamped or overturned by encounters with trees and sandbars and rocks. Masts had been broken, pirogues punctured, oars shattered. Three weeks ago the keelboat had been snagged and spun around broadside to a veritable avalanche of floating timber. Only the quickness and strength of the men, leaping overboard to manhandle the huge craft, had saved the vessel. Private Gibson had nearly perished as the keelboat swung over him and ground him against the riverbed. More than once the captains had been moved to praise their soldiers. “I can say with confidents that our party is not enfereor to aney that ever was in these watters,” William had written on that day. And five days later, the Discovery again had been almost swamped by collapsing riverbanks, and he had written, “We saved her by som extordenerry exersions of our party who are ever readdy to incounter the fortigues for the promotion of the Enterprise.”

  William’s affection and admiration for the men, and their appreciation of each other, was unexpectedly becoming one of the best aspects of the adventure. Comradeship kept their morale high even through the fierce, sultry heat, the sudden windstorms, the long downpours of rain, the ceaseless torments of mosquitoes, ticks, flies, and gn
ats.

  Fine as they were, though, they were men, and therefore not perfect, and the imperfections of a couple of them had brought up this gloomy prospect of the whippings.

  Collins had disappointed him again.

  Three days ago, while several tons of flooded baggage from the Discovery were spread on the shore to dry, Private Collins had been assigned to guard the whiskey barrels. Private Hugh Hall, tempted by his usual great thirst, had persuaded Collins to relax his vigilance. They had been caught at it. A five-man court martial had been assembled under Sergeant Pryor, and had sentenced Hall to fifty lashes for stealing whiskey and Collins to one hundred lashes for being negligent on guard duty. The punishments were to be administered this evening by the enlisted men.

  That dadblamed Collins, William thought. I hope for his own good that he learns this time. I’d hate to have to give up on a man of such spirit and send ’im back.

  He returned to his journal. It was hard to think and write now. A whipping upset his day. It always had. As his mother had often said, “The worst way a body can waste his time is in hurtin’ another body.”

  Brother George had been right about one thing, this journey had proved already: about songs and jokes. The best part of these days for the men had been the evenings, when Cruzatte and Gibson would get out their fiddles and play dancing music around the campfires. Men whom one would have thought too exhausted to move would get up and dance like dervishes, yipping and stamping and cavorting. And they would sing home songs sometimes, and josh each other about things that had happened on the river during the hard, hot days. It was high spirit, not fear of the whip, that made them try so hard.